Whitley Strieber, Jesus Stuff |498|

What I'm hearing here is that man got/gets duped into New testament Christianity.
Man works in symbol , thoses symbols carry the meaning. Star Wars with the Evil darth vader and the good Luck Star Walker aligned with the force , these caracters coencide with ideas that are held metaphysically and are expressed in the story. The story to me is pretty stupid yet to many the they can relate.Was any body being duped here?
Christianity took hold because it represent(ed) Metaphysical ideas and dilemmas. The actually facts (was Jesus nailed to a cross? i think not), don't matter.
It should be obvious the Mind of man will create stories that are going to express what what is going on inside , again who's being fooled. i guess we could say -- if we confuse symbols with the emotional/ intellectual reality with actually what's behind them...and by the way this Alien theory falls into this category as well.

I like this talk, Ted, but if we are going to think of everything in terms of symbols, including Aliens, we might as well be ordering Chinese food without legible interpretation.
 
https://stolenhistory.net/threads/the-mystery-religions.5314/#post-9860.
Here is an article I wrote about Jesus and the mystery religions. I'm hoping someone will rebut it using the New Testament..
Mr B
nice. But I always see a contradiction with
The purpose of Religion is to control you... Jesus (religion) is teaching the way to the higher mind.

I get your point, it doesn't have to be a contradiction, but it keeps coming back to the same questions about the source/ purpose/ usefulness of these religious text.
 
people quickly cling to stereotypical, common ground when confronted with strange circumstances.
agreed.

For example, let us say the situation with the "Alien," or whatever it was, Demon, as my Mom would call it, was true. Supposedly she is laying and bed, reading the bible, and this thing opens the door. Next, she says, "I command you to leave in the name of Jesus!"
ok, but another way to interpret this is that since we are co-creators of reality, our will / intention/ energy is always in play and can be all-powerful and situations like this. this seems to be what people who encounter these beings on a more regular basis say. they say that if you have a lot of control of the situation. so you can command in the name of whoever you believe in... including yourself.

it seems to be what tom zinser is saying too.

interestingly, it doesn't seem to work with alien abduction... at least the reports I've read. anyone have a different perspective on this with regard to alien abduction?[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]
 
nice. But I always see a contradiction with
The purpose of Religion is to control you... Jesus (religion) is teaching the way to the higher mind.

I get your point, it doesn't have to be a contradiction, but it keeps coming back to the same questions about the source/ purpose/ usefulness of these religious text.

I think it is kind of like a vaccine... a cocktail that might contain some useful stuff... also might contain some things that leave you crippled with auto-immune issues for ages. That was/is my experience with Christianity (our family started attending a church in the last few months)

I don't think any simple one dimensional explanation for the rise of Christianity can be found. I think we have to hold all these factors in mind at once:

  1. Mystical, non-dual, oneness, boundary dissolution, ego-death types of experiences happen to people all the time through meditation, prayer, drugs, spontaneously... David Icke had one. Jesus (assume for the moment there was a guy who was charismatic and drew a large crowd) seems to have had such an experience so many passage reflect his feeling that he had a stretchy identity: "Before Abraham was born, I Am." "I and the Father are One." When people with such an experience are also gifted speakers, leaders, and have some knowledge, they can become quite powerful and are placed on a pedestal by some and hated by others even if their original message was: this type of thing can happen to anyone.
  2. Such experiences are often accompanied by increase in love and compassion and according to Patanjali there are the Siddhis... working of miracles that sound a lot like the things Jesus did. We here at Skeptiko are not ideologically opposed to the occurrence of such things but also not predisposed to accept them at face value.
  3. An ideology of pacifism and anti-semitism and anti-zionism would be desirable by the Romans at the time which may have prompted their co-opting of these stories to weaken their opposition in Judea, but later (Constantine and beyond) a pacifist ideology and personal God-hood was antithetical to the strong church-state and so the scriptures were deliberately obscured from the people.
  4. Pacifism leads to martyrdom which can lead to blowback, but only if martyrs are publicized and personalized and not merely a statistic. Initially the blowback was on the Jews as was desired by the Romans but later the blowback was on the Roman government so the solution was first to bury the martyrs in statistics (Nero) and later (Constantine) to co-opt further and legitimize the religion.
  5. The stories of the gospels were orally repeated for years or decades prior to being written down making their historicity highly questionable.
  6. The principle of natural selection applied to memes means that archetypal elements are selected for replication and less powerful details are forgotten.
  7. The stories seem to draw from another source: "Q" which has never been found.
  8. The stories seem to draw from other ancient mystery religions.
  9. Many cults or secret societies probably splintered off from Egypt and later Persia to protect esoteric knowledge through the ages. Essenes may have been one. Initiation into such mystery schools often involved traumatic events designed to induce a Near Death Experience (such as baptism which was later adulterated for mass consumption into mere dunking or spritzing), and we know from our modern study of NDE's and trauma that such things can "open a door".
  10. We are not ideologically opposed to prophecy (remote viewing for example has shown the stretchiness of time).
  11. We are not ideologically opposed to astrology - that fate can be written in the stars to a certain extent as history appears to be "authored" to a certain extent by a higher order mind and as such is full of synchronicity and symbolic coincidence.
  12. There are at least 2 layers to this game: 1) What can you win in this one life? 2) What do you want to build into your soul's character that will last beyond this one life? Christianity gets people to play the longer game which is advantageous to the people who are are playing the short game.
  13. The Roman empire with its roads and its urbanism and its (sometimes) peace created a revolution in communication that is comparable to the invention of the internet. Such an explosion of communication is partly responsible for this new religion coalescing around a hodgepodge of ancient and esoteric ideas sourced from around the world.
That's all I can think of at the moment... more?
 
That is one way of looking at it. The other way is that the "being/alien" realized that this person has already been duped and mind controlled by the nonsense of Christianity, so no need for an abduction here! Thank you, Jesus, for helping to create disassociated identity disorder in people for the last 2000 years!

When I occasionally end a prayer with "in Jesus name" I'm not referring to the historical figure.
 
What I'm hearing here is that man got/gets duped into New testament Christianity.
Man works in symbol , thoses symbols carry the meaning. Star Wars with the Evil darth vader and the good man Star Walker aligned with the force , these caracters coencide with ideas that are held metaphysically and are expressed in the story. The story to me is pretty stupid yet to many they relate. ...Was any body being duped here?
Christianity took hold because it represent(ed) Metaphysical ideas and dilemmas. The actually facts (was Jesus nailed to a cross? i think not), don't matter.
It should be obvious the Mind of man will create stories that are going to express what what is going on inside , again who's being fooled. i guess we could say -- if we confuse symbols with the emotional/ intellectual reality with actually what's behind them...and by the way this Alien theory falls into this category as well.
As long as there's a psyche /mind/ reality we are going to write stories because that's what we do.
I like this talk, Ted, but if we are going to think of everything in terms of symbols, including Aliens, we might as well be ordering Chinese food without legible interpretation.

I think the point, at least the way I see it, is that both you and your mom's interpretation of the alien/demon are based on a constellation of ideas, beliefs and assumptions. One interpretation is not necessarily freer of ideological thinking than the other. That is not to say, of course, that one interpretation could not be closer to the truth than the other - not all stories are made equal.

Personally, I lean toward the interpretation of aliens/demons being inhabitants of the psychic or mental realm (you could also call it astral, I suppose). At least we have evidence and experience that says to us such a place exists. Alternate universes, on the other hand, are of a more speculative nature.

Anyway, thanks for the tangle earlier in the thread, I enjoyed it.
 
agreed.


ok, but another way to interpret this is that since we are co-creators of reality, our will / intention/ energy is always in play and can be all-powerful and situations like this. this seems to be what people who encounter these beings on a more regular basis say. they say that if you have a lot of control of the situation. so you can command in the name of whoever you believe in... including yourself.

it seems to be what tom zinser is saying too.

interestingly, it doesn't seem to work with alien abduction... at least the reports I've read. anyone have a different perspective on this with regard to alien abduction?
[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]

I don't know, brother. I wouldn't call us co-creators of anything. I think that we are participating in life, and there is no way to define or explain any of it. Also, I know that strange things happen.
 
A

And why didn't I think of that first!
How obvious..of course take out Chinese food...

Exactly, brother. We are never going to be forked as long as we use chopsticks.
 
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thx for the correction. I will stop using the term Rabbi when ref Josephus (I don't think I did re Jesus). No, but Whitley did. Sorry, I should have been clearer about that.

but the point about his unreliability remains:

was born in Jerusalem in 37 CE as the son of Matthias, a man from priestly descent, and a mother who claimed royal blood. Stated differently, he was born as a Sadducee and an aristocrat. The boy must have been a real know-it-all, because he excelled in all his studies and at the age of sixteen, he decided to find out for himself what philosophy was best - that of the Sadducees, that of the Essenes or that of the Pharisees. Although he studied all three systems, he was not content, and for three years, he lived in the desert with a hermit named Bannus. Returning to Jerusalem at the age of nineteen, he choose to become a Pharisee.

At least, this is what he writes in his Autobiography. The problem is that it cannot be true. To become an Essene, one had to study three years and we may assume that one did not understand the essentials of the teachings of other Jewish sects within a few weeks either. It was simply impossible to study the three disciplines and live three years in the desert before one's nineteenth year. Worse, the Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities show a profound dislike of the Pharisees. Hence, we may conclude that Josephus only says that he became a Pharisee because he knew from where the wind was blowing, and Phariseism was very popular at the moment he was writing his Autobiography.

Alex, I don't doubt that Josephus is not a reliable historical source. My point was that the disagreement between you and Whitley seemed to be within the narrow gamut of whether Josephus was reliable, or not. You're both applying a perspective gained from this keyhole vision to judge the historicity, or otherwise, of Jesus. I agree with you that the synoptic gospels are laced with generous amounts of Roman Propaganda. However, if you haven't already, I suggest you read some of the works of Biblical scholars such as Robert Eisenmann, Barbara Thiering and James D. Tabor. They don't all agree with each other in every detail, but they concur that the gospels, as we have them today, are far from historical. Even so, that is not the same as saying that they are nothing but Roman propaganda. There are undercurrents in the texts that hint at a very different Jesus from the one that is spun in the gospels and each of these scholars, in different ways, has done much to elucidate this through exegesis. The original Jesus movement was born into a highly complex set of historical historical circumstances. Moreover, it was a religious-political movement which sought to drive the Romans from Palestine, as Dr. Tabor's archaeological work exemplifies.

You mention that Josephus' mother was of royal blood, but she was descended from the post-exile Hasmonean kings. The three scholars I've just mentioned all go into some depth to show how a historical Jesus was most probably descended from the Davidic royal line, whose members would have thought of the Hasmoneans as usurpers. Don't you think that there might just have been some scope for antipathy - not to say disinformation - there on the part of Josephus? If you don't know about Dr. Eisenmann's work on the historicity of original Jewish Jerusalem Church, nor about Dr. Thiering's extensive research into Jesus' connections with the Qumran Community (aka the Essenes) through John the Baptist, then you can't hope to come to an informed decision on any of this, in my humble opinion. If the synoptic gospels are not historical, then neither is the Gospel according to Atwill either, I'm afraid.
 
So...trying in the good faith effort to get at the heart of the matter, that is for me what's the bother with the Christ story?...My take; its symbolism is to simple, to child like. Thats it was written for another time.
Could the new story involve aliens, star people, abuductions and on and on..
Rather then say God and his army of angels and demons of old..maybe..
Here's something I do know always better the story played out in real life , real people real events, then a dry text
And ever bit of that story, what every it is and will be - true -
 
Alex, I don't doubt that Josephus is not a reliable historical source. My point was that the disagreement between you and Whitley seemed to be within the narrow gamut of whether Josephus was reliable, or not. You're both applying a perspective gained from this keyhole vision to judge the historicity, or otherwise, of Jesus. I agree with you that the synoptic gospels are laced with generous amounts of Roman Propaganda. However, if you haven't already, I suggest you read some of the works of Biblical scholars such as Robert Eisenmann, Barbara Thiering and James D. Tabor. They don't all agree with each other in every detail, but they concur that the gospels, as we have them today, are far from historical. Even so, that is not the same as saying that they are nothing but Roman propaganda. There are undercurrents in the texts that hint at a very different Jesus from the one that is spun in the gospels and each of these scholars, in different ways, has done much to elucidate this through exegesis. The original Jesus movement was born into a highly complex set of historical historical circumstances. Moreover, it was a religious-political movement which sought to drive the Romans from Palestine, as Dr. Tabor's archaeological work exemplifies.

You mention that Josephus' mother was of royal blood, but she was descended from the post-exile Hasmonean kings. The three scholars I've just mentioned all go into some depth to show how a historical Jesus was most probably descended from the Davidic royal line, whose members would have thought of the Hasmoneans as usurpers. Don't you think that there might just have been some scope for antipathy - not to say disinformation - there on the part of Josephus? If you don't know about Dr. Eisenmann's work on the historicity of original Jewish Jerusalem Church, nor about Dr. Thiering's extensive research into Jesus' connections with the Qumran Community (aka the Essenes) through John the Baptist, then you can't hope to come to an informed decision on any of this, in my humble opinion. If the synoptic gospels are not historical, then neither is the Gospel according to Atwill either, I'm afraid.
Inspiring response.
I read it this morning and the word that jumped into my head was “allegory”.
We know that in Old Testament times the phrase “first-born” was was often used to just describe a favorite… so, if you allow me to make a huge extrapolation, I think I have a decent argument against Alex’s portrayal..and more toward Stieber (not that I know his stance well)..

What if Josephus was painting his own story in-line with an archetype in order to ring an existing bell, rather than a newly invented one? Intentionally or not…

Perhaps this type of exaggeration of heroic traits was ridiculously common for that (and most of) time. Which is why Strieber may be right to insist it’s perhaps folly to apply the google researcher lens to biblical stories as opposed to an allegorical lens.

To smuggle in my own perception, I don’t care if Jesus existed or not, performed the miracles or not. To me, the name Jesus describes a being of unconditionally infinite positive regard.
People ask “how dumb a story that God would kill his son.” I’ll argue, just take Jordan Peterson for a comically easy example... a random 2010’s intellectual gets popular trying to teach young men to respect themselves and their communities. I beg anyone to try to argue those SJW’s wouldn’t have crucifed rando-Peterson if they had a legally sanctioned chance. They would have sold tickets.
How much more would any-generation-ever’s SJW’s happily murder a being resembling a significant degree of potential to amplify on a grand scale unconditional love and forgiveness?
And if you have the balls to answer that question, the next question is: Why would that stop a being of infinite love from taking the trip?
 
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By the way what is it that most Catholics don't believe, only "powers and principalities," or 'Sumerian texts mention aliens'
If the latter, I was given to understand that a keeper of the texts lost his job because he got too deep into translation - was sacked when he came up with the alien story
By the way what is it that most Catholics don't believe, only "powers and principalities," or 'Sumerian texts mention aliens'
If the latter, I was given to understand that a keeper of the texts lost his job because he got too deep into translation - was sacked when he came up with the alien story

Most Catholics do believe in the possible existence of Aliens , evolution ,and most common sense science.
 
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My mother was a Theosophist and took me to meetings from age 10. At the same time I went through confirmation as a Anglican.
The deal was, if I became confirmed, which means confirming and accepting your faith, I could then reject it if I wanted to.
So that's what I did.
The Theosophy has stayed with me, I'm open to anything but not really a believer in anything
I think that it likely that love is the fundamental thing and that evil worshippers are narcissists who have more work to do
I come nearest to believing that NDE's prove an afterlife. I've seen a ghost and a UFO -

Some of Theosophy I agree with , but in its entirety its anti-Christian or anti-Jesus. By the way, its founder, has been caught up being a
fraud in some aspects
 
Alex, I don't doubt that Josephus is not a reliable historical source. My point was that the disagreement between you and Whitley seemed to be within the narrow gamut of whether Josephus was reliable, or not. You're both applying a perspective gained from this keyhole vision to judge the historicity, or otherwise, of Jesus. I agree with you that the synoptic gospels are laced with generous amounts of Roman Propaganda. However, if you haven't already, I suggest you read some of the works of Biblical scholars such as Robert Eisenmann, Barbara Thiering and James D. Tabor. They don't all agree with each other in every detail, but they concur that the gospels, as we have them today, are far from historical. Even so, that is not the same as saying that they are nothing but Roman propaganda. There are undercurrents in the texts that hint at a very different Jesus from the one that is spun in the gospels and each of these scholars, in different ways, has done much to elucidate this through exegesis. The original Jesus movement was born into a highly complex set of historical historical circumstances. Moreover, it was a religious-political movement which sought to drive the Romans from Palestine, as Dr. Tabor's archaeological work exemplifies.

You mention that Josephus' mother was of royal blood, but she was descended from the post-exile Hasmonean kings. The three scholars I've just mentioned all go into some depth to show how a historical Jesus was most probably descended from the Davidic royal line, whose members would have thought of the Hasmoneans as usurpers. Don't you think that there might just have been some scope for antipathy - not to say disinformation - there on the part of Josephus? If you don't know about Dr. Eisenmann's work on the historicity of original Jewish Jerusalem Church, nor about Dr. Thiering's extensive research into Jesus' connections with the Qumran Community (aka the Essenes) through John the Baptist, then you can't hope to come to an informed decision on any of this, in my humble opinion. If the synoptic gospels are not historical, then neither is the Gospel according to Atwill either, I'm afraid.

Who cares what Jesus was or was not doing? You can't tell what Jesus was or was not doing, but only all this nonsense people talk about him. Christianity is a psychological stain on humanity that cannot easily be removed. People don't even know why they are Christian. If you ask about it, they are confused beyond all hell and just refer to the book they read. I am not saying that "Christians" are bad people, but anybody that can't question the foundation of what they believe in is kind of full of shit. It doesn't matter what religion you come from. Let me clarify, if you are so deep in a religion that you cease to see it as a religion, and you call yourself "spiritual," yet you are still reading the same damn book and hanging around the same full of shit people.....guess what, you are still religious!

Hail Valhalla! Watch until the end. This is what we need, the end of the pity religions and a return to greatness.

 
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